Opinion: Obama campaigns across the country and Bill Clinton’s ratings soar. Coincidence?
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It looks like the Obama White House political master plan to tag Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with the party’s upcoming mid-term election losses while boosting ex-President Clinton’s favorable ratings across the country is working like a charm.
Since the unemployment and Afghanistan situations have been taken care of, the incumbent president continues his premature 2012 multi-state campaign swing through the Midwest today, urging any surviving Democrats to vote on Nov. 2.
And a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reveals that although she represents only one insignificant district in San Francisco, that fading waterfront suburb of Oakland, fully half of all Americans in the other 434 districts have developed some kind of negative feeling about Pelosi, an amazing achievement in this era of Obama post-partisanship.
As the always astute Byron York points out, that gives Pelosi the same negative national rating as....
...black-hat international corporation BP, whose successful discovery of oil in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year turned into a disastrous spill and the country’s worst environmental disaster. Good thing Republican Sarah Palin doesn’t want to be House speaker; her positive rating is currently 7% higher than Speaker Pelosi’s 23%. Also lucky for Pelosi that evil Newt Gingrich doesn’t want his old GOP speaker’s gavel back; even his positives are better.
Meanwhile, fellow Democrat Bill Clinton’s favorable ratings have soared 10 points in the last year to 55%, way above Obama’s fairly stagnant 47%. That 22d Amendment looks like an Obama lifesaver.
The survey of 1,000 adults last week also found the following:
-- Seventy-three percent of Americans disapprove of the job being done by the Democrat-controlled Congress, up from 71% in August, while 20% approve, down from 21%.
-- Sen. Harry Reid’s Very Positive rating surged 50% between August and September -- from 2% up to 3%.
-- About six in 10 Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction; almost one in three think things are going right.
-- Despite Obama’s best efforts to give him abundant credit for stalling even more administration spending, half of the country doesn’t know anything about this John Boehner Republican fellow in the House.
-- Fifty percent of voters are very interested in the Nov. 2 midterm elections today, up from 47% in August.
-- Twenty-seven percent describe themselves as ‘tea party’ supporters, but many more (42%) think the movement is a good thing.
-- From January to September, the proportion of Americans holding Obama responsible for the economic mess nearly doubled, from 17% to 32%. A fading majority (56%) think he inherited the problem, down from 84% early last year.
-- Finally, a plurality of Americans (35%) say the major broadcast networks remain their primary source of TV news.
-- However, nearly a quarter (24%) now list Fox News Channel as their primary source. Sixteen percent claim CNN as their main outlet. MSNBC is the survey’s worst cable news network. Only eight Americans admitted they get their TV news from there. Oh, no, wait. That’s a whopping 8%, counting Keith Olbermann’s family and friend.
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-- Andrew Malcolm
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